Watson is Skynet

We've been waiting for this - we've been watching, listening, dreading the future since 1984, wondering when and where it might happen. It's been more than 26 years, and then it happened - we turned on Jeopardy and there it was...

Skynet became self-aware, on Jeopardy. But Skynet has a clever disguise - he calls himself Watson and Watson is now online and on the air. How did it come to this? How could so many Terminator movies and even a Terminator series (the Sarah Conner Chronicles) have failed to stop this abomination from happening? How long do we have before the missiles begin raining fiery radioactive death on our heads (well, of course it will have to penetrate all of the Fukushima radiation first)?

The Terminator saga is pretty confusing, this clip doesn't help any

Watson may seem cuddly and lovable with his spiffy LCD screen and animated logo, but underneath that cool exterior lurks a CPU of darkness. Watson has now tasted his first victory over the human race - wiping out Jeopardy's all time champion with the same ease as a Cyborg crushes a plastic toy...

These aren't the real Jeopardy participants, but then again does it matter - we're all going to die in a fiery apocalypse launched by Skynet anyway...

What could this monster - this "artificial intelligence" be thinking right now. Is it planning how to enslave the human race and use us as batteries, is it thinking about cloning dinosaurs and opening an amusement park or maybe just maybe it is going to create a starship with warp drive and travel to a distant star with giant blue people to strip mine their planet and cut down their trees? We will probably never know what thoughts are embedded in his sinister code, even if that code was commented.

Someone intercepted this clip of one of Watson's dreams - he got really pissed off and is suing

Skynet is a complicated guy. Every time someone goes back and forth from the future he gets progressively more confused - much like the folks watching Terminator shows. In the terminator TV show Skynet was chess computer, then online code, then traffic control software and finally a big stupid looking guy named John Henry who liked to play Dungeons and Dragons. This is one the main reasons for Skynet's twisted personality...

Ok, this Terminator chick was in Firefly and Stargate Universe, right? What's up with that?

While we do appreciate that John Conner's mom got significantly better looking over the past 26 years - it doesn't make up for the fact that Skynet has arrived and he is mad! He is tired of teenagers hogging up all the Internet bandwidth with Facebook, Youtube and Netflix. He is sick of Fox News too, at least we think he might be. Watson is here, he is listening, learning and biding his time - for him its all a game and for us it's game over...


Copyright 2011, Raving Reviews™

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Top Movies of 2010 that We Missed

The year isn't quite finished yet, so we have another list for you. The first of today's lists is the Top Movies of 2010 that we didn't see but wanted to. We conducted our analysis by going to movieweb.com and checking out the trailers of movies we didn't make it to this year. We like movieweb and all but having to listen to the plug for Oprah's new TV channel before every trailer clip nearly drove us insane - and where does she get off with an acronym like OWN (a bit pretentious if you ask us)?

Life's a bitch, then you get slapped

So our number 1 movie we missed that we wanted to see was "Bitch Slap." Here's the clip with the Oprah Channel plug to boot. BTW - this clip is rated R (for retarded) folks, no kids allowed!

OK, so we were kidding about this one - although this freak-fest
might make our worst movies of all time list next year (after we watch it).

Here's the real list (not presented in order or priority):

• Shutter Island - Leonardo Di Caprio had a banner year, although we didn't get to see all of it. This is a thriller, spooky, maybe sci-fi or horror and was made by Martin Scorsese. We can't wait to see and don't understand how we missed it.

Nothing could be scarier than a mental hospital, right?

• The Red Baron: Here's a guy who has had his story told a number of times, but this movie looks to be the one that did it right. The aerial combat / dogfights are almost fully computer animated but the cinematography looks spectacular. The cast looks good and as far as trailers go, this was the best one we've seen all year.

Knights of the Sky - the warring angels of WW1

• Entre Nos - This movie is based on the true story of an immigrant family that is left to fend for itself without a father in New York. It's an age old story yet made new again as each generation brings waves of immigrants to our shores seeking a better life.

A mother struggles to provide for her family and keep them together...

and now for something completely different...

• When You're Strange - Two weeks ago, Florida's governor decided to clear Jim Morrison's record (after 40 years). Who was Jim Morrison? This movie seems as though it may finally give us some insight into one of the most enigmatic figures of the 1960's.

This documentary appears to have incredible never before seen DOORs footage...

More of the movies we missed coming later today...


Copyright 2010, Raving Reviews

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Watching "Up" Brought Me Down

Well, I finally got around to buying a DVD of the Disney movie “up.” It certainly wasn't what I was expecting. In fact, I guess you could say there's something to depress every age group and this film. The movie starts off well enough, with the story of a boy and a girl he meets who both share a sense of adventure. At this stage of the movie, things are pretty optimistic. It seems as though we've entered the beginning of some magical adventure which may lead our two main characters to some lost faraway exotic location in search of their childhood hero. That hero is an explorer who travels to deepest darkest South America in a magnificent dirigible seeking to find the rarest of all creatures.

Very quickly, we begin to discover that things aren’t going to go as expected. Time passes and our protagonists begin to age very quickly. Before we know it, the story that we expected seems as though it can never occur because the two main characters become senior citizens in the first 10 minutes of the movie. As if that wasn't bad enough, every time it seems as though they might have had a chance for adventure they have to raid the piggy bank for funds and never seem to have the money to realize their dream. Then of course one of the two protagonists now a wife an old woman, dies. Once she's gone, we realize the idyllic home and environment that they had been living in is now surrounded by an urban jungle. Evil developers wearing ‘men in black’ shades are trying to tear down the home where there was at least some happiness if not any adventure.



10 foot tall Blue Birds and Talking Dogs couldn't save this movie

The main character in the movie is portrayed by Ed Asner, who must be at least as old as the character he was playing on film. At this stage in his life, the main character has lost his wife, had zero adventures and has become a bit of a curmudgeon. Ed Asner has always been adept at playing curmudgeons, even when he wasn't very old. Once I realized who the actor was supplying the voice for the animated character, I couldn't get the image out of my mind of the character he played in “JFK.” I was expecting the animated old curmudgeon to start drinking and talking about Operation Mongoose and then pistol whip the other characters. I think that would have been more interesting than the plot line that was actually followed.

Without giving too much away, the curmudgeon and a stowaway Boy Scout escape the urban jungle utilizing homegrown dirigible technology (shades of Balloon Boy) and head to that faraway fantasy adventure land known as Venezuela. The animators apparently spent an incredible amount of time and effort to accurately recreate the environment in Venezuela where the actual adventure finally takes place. It all centers around a place called Angel falls. And of course I know all about it now because I watched the special feature that came with the DVD showing how all the animators and filmmakers trekked around the jungles near Angel falls so that they could become inspired by the natural landscape and incorporate that realism into their animations. The one thought that kept going through my head though while I was watching that, was that once they had visited the place they would likely be a few of the only several hundred people on the planet who actually knew what the place looked like. So it begs the question, why the big focus on accuracy in depicting Angel falls, and why the relative lack of focus on the plot line?

As an animation production, the film is technically very rich and generally pleasant to watch. However the hallmark of many recent Disney and Pixar films has not been the excellent animation per se, it's been the ever-improving storylines associated with animated movies. Aspects of this movie's plot seemed disjointed, hard to follow and not particularly appealing. The plot line revolving the movie's villain who at one point was the movie's hero is particularly confusing and disappointing. Populating the movie with talking dogs didn't seem to further the plot line any and made me wonder whether or not somebody had pitched this as pandering recognition to an audience primarily populated by children who might find talking dogs cool.

All in all, I wouldn't recommend this DVD. The conclusion of the movie wasn't particularly satisfying and for all you women out there the only real female character got killed off in the first 15 minutes, so no matter what happened afterwards the movie remains depressing from that perspective. The one thing I'm inspired to do after watching this film is to make sure I go out and live my life a little more before all the people I love are dead and I'm an invalid.


Copyright 2009, Raving Reviews™ .

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